The number of bowel cancer patients who are admitted to hospital as an emergency is "stubbornly" high, an audit of the disease has found.

Around 22% of patients who suffer the disease are taken to hospital as an emergency case.

People who are admitted this way are likely to have a more advanced stage of cancer, which is often harder to treat.

The authors of the National Bowel Cancer Audit said that emergency admission rates are a "substantial challenge".

The audit, conducted by the Health and Social Care Information Centre, also found that patients who are operated on are almost twice as likely to live for two years beyond cancer diagnosis compared with those who are not.

The data from more than 50,000 bowel cancer patients found that four in five who underwent major surgery in England and Wales between April 2008 and March 2010 lived beyond two years of diagnosis.

But only two in every five who were too frail to have surgery or whose cancer was too advanced for them to be operated on survived for two years, researchers found.

Mark Flannagan, chief executive of the charity Beating Bowel Cancer, said: "A major concern is that there hasn't been any improvement on the number of people being diagnosed with bowel cancer as an emergency - when the disease tends to be more advanced and outcomes poorer.

"A mixture of embarrassment, worry and lack of awareness means that people delay seeking help until it's too late.

"More needs to be done to educate both the public and GPs about the symptoms of bowel cancer and how vital it is to catch it early."

Nigel Scott, audit clinical lead and consultant colorectal surgeon at the Royal Preston Hospital, said: "Blood, bowels and poo tend to get sat on, as embarrassment puts people off from seeing the doctor.

"Getting past the bathroom door and seeking the support of a health professional is the best means of finding a cancer as soon as possible."

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Things That Lower Colorectal Cancer Risk

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Researchers from Britain and the Netherlands found that the more total dietary fiber and cereal fiber people consumed, the lower their colorectal cancer risk. For example, people who consumed an extra 90 grams of whole grains a day also had a 20 percent lower risk of colorectal cancer, according to the British Medical Journal review.
However, that same study didn't show a link between eating fiber from fruits and vegetables and a lowered colorectal cancer risk, meaning there may be something else in whole grains at work, too.

Researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands found that people who take aspirin once a day have a 30 percent decreased risk of dying from colorectal cancer, if taken for at least a nine-month period.
And, the benefit extended to after a person had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer. The researchers found that people who had already been diagnosed and who took aspirin had a 23 percent decreased risk of dying from the disease, compared with people who didn't take it at all.

The Daily Mail reported on a study in mice, published in the journal Molecular Nutrition and Food Research, showing that rats exposed to a carcinogen developed fewer colon cancer lesions than rats if they consumed high-cocoa diets.
"Being exposed to different poisons in the diet like toxins, mutagens and procarcinogens, the intestinal mucus is very susceptible to pathologies," study researcher Maria Angeles Martin Arribas, a researcher at the Institute of Food Science and Technology and Nutrition, said in a statement. "Foods like cocoa, which is rich in polyphenols, seems to play an important role in protecting against disease."
However, it's important to note that this effect was tested only on mice.

Research published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research showed that taking 2 grams of ginger root supplement every day might have colon cancer-preventing powers. The researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School found that taking ginger root supplements helped to minimize signs of inflammation of the colon, which has been connected to colon cancer.

A study from the University of Texas Health Science Center showed that doctors who conduct colonoscopies while listening to Mozart are more likely to find polyps, which can lead to colon cancer, ABC News reported. The study showed that polyp-detection increased to 36.7 percent from 27.16 percent when the doctors listened to Mozart.

A study in the journal Cancer Causes & Control showed that people who exercise or play sports five or more times a week can lower their risk of developing colorectal cancer, compared with those who don't exercise regularly (or at all), Johns Hopkins University reported.
Why exercise might reduce colon cancer risk isn't well understood. It may be because exercise enhances the immune system or because it reduces levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factors, all of which have been associated with colon cancer risk.

A number of studies have linked the consumption of cruciferous vegetables with a decreased risk of colorectal cancer, Oregon State University reported, though the effect may depend on a person's genetic risk.
In particular, a study published in 2000 in the American Journal of Epidemiology, showed that people who ate the most cruciferous veggies in a day (about 58 grams per day, on average) had a lower risk of colon cancer compared with people who ate the fewest cruciferous veggies in a day (about 11 grams per day, on average), Oregon State University reported.

A study in mice showed that compounds called anthocyanins, found in black raspberries, seem to have powers at anti-colorectal cancer powers, MyHealthNewsDaily reported.
The berries may help to prevent cancer because of their "high antioxidant activity," study researcher Gary Stoner, of the College of Medicine at Ohio State University, told MyHealthNewsDaily; those antioxidants work to fight against DNA-damaging free radicals in the body.